I want to thank everyone for a fabulous wedding. It pretty much went perfectly, and was everything I could have hoped for. We were relaxed and emotional at the ceremony (me and my “wife” hehe), the food was delicious, everything was SO BEAUTIFUL, the serenading was hilarious, the DJs and photographers were amazing, the cakes were awesome, the flowers were gorgeous (I had no clue how they would look, and I was wonderfully pleased), it was great to see all the friends and families, and I never stopped smiling the entire night.

Actually, the only bit of drama was long before the wedding started… apparently I walked too close to the cars when I got in to come from the hotel, and it covered the front of my dress in black gunk. FORTUNATELY, my dad is a quick thinker, and prevented me from freaking out by producing some duct tape, and in a matter of minutes it was reduced to a small, unnoticable stain (thankfully, it was car dust and not grease… quick thinking on his part!)

Anyway, I’m loving all the pictures and can’t wait for the real ones!

Waking up the next morning realizing I was married was strange… not any different than I felt before! But now there will be a lot of work- moving, changing addresses and names and accounts and everything… and a new set of challenges to face. But, despite sleeping in a messy, half-empty, sawdust covered NEW CONDO (yay!) and waking up coughing, I think I will love every minute of it… or at least most of them (note to self: next time you pack frantically at 10:30pm, remember soap and a loofah. You will like yourself more the next morning).

I’m blogging about this from the new couch in the new condo! We’ve got a long way to go until we live here (like, you know, tearing out walls and floors) but we closed yesterday and here I am, trying not to fall asleep.

Tomorrow is the big day. It’s been a long time coming and I don’t really feel prepared, but I am pretty sure that’s normal. Rehearsal yesterday was fine and all I have to do is memorize my vows… we shall see.

By the way, if you are staying at the hotel, the shuttle leaves TO the Chateau at 5:30 and FROM the chateau at midnight.

With only four days left, it seems like pretty much everything has been wrapped up. We just assembled all of our favors this past weekend, so everything is boxed up and ready to be taken there some on Thursday (rehearsal day) where we can leave it in storage, and some on Saturday morning. Really, the only thing I feel that I have to do is get the music to the DJ, and make sure everyone has their lists. Oh, and make my own packing lists for Friday/Saturday/Sunday. Tonight, everyone descends upon us, and it doesn’t let up until we collapse into our hotel room late Saturday night.

In terms of the condo, it looks like closing is on Thursday, and possibly at 2pm. We don’t know where, yet. Oy. But in the meantime we’ve been packing as much as possible, because we won’t have time to do that next week when we’re trying to paint and move. It looks like there will be a week or two where we still live apart after the wedding… such is life! At least we will finally be homeowners.

I’ve still been working myself to death, right up till Sunday night when I was working until almost 3am… I hated myself for it, but was scared enough about our income to take it on. We spent a lot of money this past weekend on furniture and appliances, and we have more to spend on the hardware, paint, and of course the flooring… stimulating the economy all by myself!

I once again feel like I have too litte time and too much to do, and I realized blogging isn’t helping me all that much. But I wanted to make sure that I got this down on “paper” so I could look back on it all later, and laugh at myself for being so overworked and foolish.

Well, we’ve had our big meeting with the Chateau to wrap up loose ends and start the final planning, including the flowcharts for the rooms and how things will work. Most of the details, including details that are probably “too detailed” for my taste, have been worked out… my last real task is the final lists, which I am beginning tonight.

We even got the seating charts done within a couple of hours and without too much ridiculousness! 188 people at the tables, and 12 people at the head table… the room sits 200 so we’re perfect! And everyone will know people at their table, and hopefully no awkward seating arrangements as far as people getting along.

Oh geez, I still have to call the hotel for Steve & Alecia’s wedding. Yikes, I’d better go do that right now.

Hey all! Just letting everyone know that apparently our reception goes until MIDNIGHT, not 11pm as we were originally told. So… yay for more time to party!

And I’m feeling fairly calm. Since I basically dropped my freelance work, much to the horror of my checkbook, I’ve somewhat got my evenings free to do some work. And I have the wedding program is all designed, the photo list has been sent, the budget is updated, and things are getting checked off the list. The major stuff left will be started on Saturday with our meetings at the Chateau and with our baker, Sharon. Really after that, it’s just seating charts and putting together the MASTER LISTS. Tough, but not impossible. I’m really not freaked out as much. I can’t believe people are going to start showing up next weekend already… I don’t have time for that! Lol.

About the condo? More so. Looks like we’ll have a week before the wedding to move in, IF we can close on the 15th. Who even knows anymore? I’m just playing it by ear. We were there last night to get quotes on the bedroom flooring, and the guy (who is an old family friend of the realtor) was extremely nice. Hopefully it all goes moderately smoothly.

Been getting a few wedding gifts by mail… the pile is growing! Looking forward to being able to put all of that stuff to use… and complete the registry after it’s over.

“Less than a month” is a completely different feeling than “more than a month” for sure! And so much has happened since my last post…

Last weekend, we picked out Chris’s ring, which both of us are excited about. It’s hard to describe in words, but I’ll do my best: It’s white gold, there are two thin, shiny bands on the outside, and the middle, thicker band is actually hand-hammered… it looked like the texture of a cymbal, which is why we thought it was so appropriate. We will be able to pick these up on the 16th.

After the rings, we met with the DJ and his wife/assistant at a coffee shop to run down the song lists and order of events. We loved seeing them again, and I’m excited to work with them as well as the MC. I love how I always forget that acronym means “Master of Ceremonies,” how appropriate. Anyway, it went well, but we need to call them again because things have changed in the meantime.

I took Monday off that week to make up for Friday, and my mom and I went down to the photographer to pay the remaining balance and turn in our information. I still have to give them my “must take” list, but that will be done early this week. We will have a phone consultation with the photographer on the week of our wedding.

After that, we drove over to the Chateau to try to get our logistical questions answered, and it went better than we could have hoped! We actually wound up switching rooms to the slightly larger one that we visited the first time we were there, over a year ago. This will work out fabulously because no one is booked before us in that room, so we can get in early to set up and take pictures if we need to. We also decided to do all of our dining in the atrium, which will be beautiful since it is all white (the pictures on their website have a few good ones depicting how that will look). So, the banquet room will be used for cocktail hour, and then dancing. Another cool thing: After our ceremony, during cocktail hour, we will have a special cake cutting ceremony right there on the dance floor with everyone around us, rather than waiting until dinner. It’s a really cool idea.

Note to self: put gum on all the tables to counteract effects of black-dyed frosting. Lol.

Anyway, we’ll have to redo our talks with the DJ to let him know he has two rooms to do the sound, rather than just one. But we have to send him some music files anyway, so it will work out.

We met with the pastor this weekend, which was a nice way to wrap up our sessions. We won’t miss the early morning drives out to Rockford, though, even though his house is very nice. I don’t actually feel like I know what I’m doing yet, but I doubt I will until the actual wedding is over. Other than that, we actually took most of the weekend off, aside from a little bit of work and me designing the wedding program cover. It was nice to almost have a break.

We are at 199 attendees (including photographer, DJ/assistant, MC who will all be eating) and I’m thinking we will get 3-4 more. That’s right where we estimated, which is exciting. It’s unfortunate that we picked Indy 500 weekend, as I’m sure more people would attend if we hadn’t, but oh well…

I’ve even talked to my “freelance boss” about the time I need off from additional work.
Also went to the dentist… yelled at for bad habits as usual. At least I went!

And still nothing new about the condo, except that we had been waiting on 2 more contracts from the building which apparently needed to be signed (wish they had told us this!) Now, those are taken care of, so we should be hearing from the bank any day now…

Friday: Doctor’s appt (should find out if Illinois needs blood tests for marriage) and getting marriage license. Wow!

I was supposed to be off work today taking paperwork to the photographer and dealing with all kinds of organizational things… BUT seeing as how I am typing this from the train into the city, that didn’t happen (actually I was SUPPOSED to be off on the 23rd to do that, but on Wednesday they rescheduled that to today because they scheduled a meeting on the 23rd. And then yesterday they scheduled a meeting for today. Sigh.) So the point is, I do not know when that will happen now, but it has to happen before the 23rd. Somehow.

We picked out most of our song list last night, but cannot decide on a good Garter Removing song. I really don’t want to do any of the common ones because they are overdone. We’ll be asking the DJ for advice at our Saturday evening meeting. But everything else is picked out… my favorite is that we didn’t want to do a bridal party slow dance because none of the bridal party are couples with each other, and the boys are mostly not big dancers (except my brother) so we decided to do Let’s Get It Started as the “bridal party dance” and open up the dance floor to everyone soon after the song starts. We tried to do a lot of fun stuff like that. Picking out songs got more annoying as the evening went on… I’m sure the DJ will pick good stuff around what we did.

We got our first wedding presents in the mail! The new, longer “thank you” list has been started. The china set is now complete!

We need to find plastic columns for the wedding decoration! Any ideas, preferably on where to rent??? We need them for the flowers, much like how they have on some of the Chateau’s photography pages (though not as many columns or flowers).

And I haven’t heard anything yet on the condo.